The Synology End Game
355 comments
·August 29, 2025tecleandor
Shank
The encryption is also broken. If you use encrypted shared folders, you have an arbitrary filename limit (https://kb.synology.com/en-ro/DSM/tutorial/File_folder_path_...). If you use volume encryption, your encryption key is stored on the NAS itself, which is capable of decrypting the data, unless you buy a second Synology NAS (https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2023/06/volume-encryption-in-syno...) to act as a key vault. Synology claims that volume encryption protects if you if the storage drives are stolen, but in what world would the drives, and not the NAS itself, be stolen?
8fingerlouie
The filename limit comes from ecryptfs (https://www.ecryptfs.org/) which is what Synology uses for encrypted shared folders.
As for full disk encryption, you can select where to store the key, which may be on the NAS itself (rendering FDE more or less useless) or on a USB key or similar.
tecleandor
For full disk encryption you need DSM >= 7.2 and you can either, store it locally (useless) or in a KMIP server. [0]
As a KMIP server you use:
- Another Synology NAS with DSM >= 7.2
- A KMIP compatible key server
--
0: https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Which_models_support_encrypted_volumesmtillman
My disk station uploaded 54gb to synology servers the other day before I had my router block outbound. Trash product.
aborsy
Why can’t the user enter the encryption passphrase in DSM, which is actually the default in LUKS and allowed in TrueNAS etc?
The DSM itself lives in an unencrypted partition or volume. Applications with data in encrypted volumes will be inaccessible until the volumes are unlocked.
As usual, there is an easy workaround. You can run a KMIP server in a docker container and set up an external keystore. Once synology allows you to proceed with volume encryption, you can discard the KMIP server if you want and use the recovery keys.
JTpe18
I understand Synology’s design approach. In enterprise environments, physical security - especially when systems are housed in ISO 27001–certified data centers—is relatively straightforward to achieve.
The primary value of disk/volume encryption is actually for scenarios like end-of-life replacement, RMA, failure and disposal - even if someone later reconstructs the disk sectors, the bits remain unreadable. This is one layer of defense in depth, not a substitute for physical security.
Synology also supports KMIP, which I see addressing two situations:
1. Data center key governance and media mobility - Multiple hosts (including spares) can use KMIP for centralized key management, improving the mobility of drives within the data center and reducing the operational cost of moving drives between machines. When decommissioning hardware, keys can be revoked directly in KMIP with an audit trail.
2. Edge/branch sites with weaker physical controls - By using KMIP, keys are kept in the more secure data center rather than on the edge device itself. The edge hardware stores no keys, so if an entire machine is stolen, it cannot be unlocked, preserving confidentiality.
tecleandor
Ah, I forgot about that. I had to take the key out of the NAS too, to a different device. That made no sense at all. And almost all of the implementations of the key server you need cost thousands of dollars in licenses.
Edit: what they deploy on their NAS is an old version of a testing implementation of the KMIP protocol. PyKMIP: https://github.com/OpenKMIP/PyKMIP
HighGoldstein
> but in what world would the drives, and not the NAS itself, be stolen?
Not to defend Synology, but popping a drive out of the NAS so that it won't be noticed (or noticed much later) is a much easier way to steal data than carrying off the whole NAS. I assume they're guarding against the kind of scenario where an employee steals steals drives rather than ski-masked thieves breaching the office and making off with the NAS.
tecleandor
But a single drive in a RAID is worth almost nothing.
cyberax
You can move out the key from the device using KMIP. I have an implementation that uses a Go-based service to store it in Nitrohsm. I'll clean it up and post a release announcement on Reddit...
tecleandor
That'd be great, as the PyKMIP implementation wasn't very intuitive... (Nor Synology docs...)
kace91
My main issue with their system is how closed it is.
I got an issue where mind would randomly start writing disk like crazy and maxing cpu usage, to the point I was bothered by the noise. I’d stop all containers, leave it as close to idle as I could manage, still spiking.
There was no way I could learn what was causing it.
I would like to assume it was a disk maintenance process or something, but for all I know it could be mining bitcoin and I’d be none the wiser. It went on for some weeks then stopped.
nolok
Ever since they added the "universal search" thingy, their NAS do that anytime they reach a decently large video file. Even if you turn down search indexing, media indexing, media thumbnails, ... It still kills itself with no throttling processing those files.
May or may not be what you encountered, but had a customer caught by this and found out the hard way you can't stop it. My issue is not the processing, it's the throttling, it's so crazy how the entire NAS gets taken down for like ten minutes (and that was on a racked xeon model), no samba no nfs no nothing answering anymore.
kace91
That might be it, I use it for radarr/sonarr so there’s a good amount of large video files in there.
And yes, the lack of trotting is an issue, since you can’t even reach an administration panel. When it’s bad even ssh struggles.
lostlogin
> writing disk like crazy and maxing cpu usage, to the point I was bothered by the noise.
Mine is in the basement for this reason. When it’s still and quiet after midnight I can still hear it grinding away. God I hate the sound.
tetris11
There are guides on how to mainline Synology NAS's to run up-to-date debian on them
jauntywundrkind
People seem very attracted to Synology because it requires very little thought & effort.
FWIW the new Ugreen NAS run Debian. I don't know a ton about it, but it's be great if they could stay a little more up to date. This Synology story with ancient forks & weird encryption sounds truly bogus.
layer8
If you want to run Debian instead of DSM, you have a much wider choice of NAS hardware than just Synology.
Kototama
You could activate the sshd service and log in to the NAS.
8fingerlouie
> Multichannel CIFS/SMB)
My DS918+ has multichannel SMB and possibly also parallel NFS. It only works if you have multiple NICs connected.
Other than that, i completely agree. Their tech stack is horribly outdated, and while i understand their reasoning for not upgrading, there's a limit to how long you can do that. Their reasoning is that they know the software that's currently running, warts and all, and can better guarantee stability across millions of devices with fewer moving parts.
tecleandor
I think multichannel works, but pNFS doesn't. But I also think I had another different feature in mind, I was just reciting by memory :P :)
dansmith1919
> A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem
But don't you love it when companies invent their own security instead of using battle-tested open-source systems?
finaard
At a customer I ended up having to help one department running two Synology boxes as a side project. I came in with low expectations, and still was thoroughly disappointed.
- one device died, was EOL at that point, and newer ones no longer can read the disks - stupid limits for array size. Depending on your setup adding disks can mean "copy everything off, delete arrays, and then create new ones". Also, want one 200TB array with your disks? Depending on model size you'll have to do multiple arrays instead with a bit to way lower capacity - syncing a share to another instance is broken, with pretty much no useful debug information. Already the setup is stupid (doesn't let you select which array it goes on the target machine), and then seems to change access permissions of the sync user on the target box (i.e., you can do one sync, after that you'll need to reset the access permissions). I wanted to avoid doing my own sync script, but seems I'll have to do that in the end - stupid disk compatibility warnings (which currently you can disable when you have SSH access) - wireguard only via third party addons. It's 2025. I didn't even check before if those things can do wireguard - it didn't occur to me that a device sold nowadays might not be able to do that.
While debugging I also noticed that pretty much every software component is from the stone age.
OptionOfT
They also have this weird full disk encryption that doesn't validate that the boot partition is compromised, allowing exploits like this: https://forums.spacerex.co/t/bounty-first-person-to-share-ho...
This breaks both the 'store key locally' and the KMIP setup.
And for their file-based encryption you cannot change the password. You need to create a new folder with a new password and copy all files over.
edem
I have a DS 923+. These extremely old softwares you mentioned were always weird to me but everything worked fine so far. What I'm not happy about is the vendor lock in, and the abysmal virtualization / transcoding performance. I want a NAS that comes with a similar ease of use as the DSM, but can double down as a __very lightweight__ virtualization platform for my local test deployments and as a media PC that I can rely on. What would you suggest?
Marsymars
I'd suggest separate systems for NAS and media serving.
I've a Ryzen Embedded system with lost of RAM as my NAS box and a small Intel N-series based system as my Plex server that pulls media off the NAS box.
benoau
Yeah but these days you can easily have one system with 10 - 20 cores so you should be able to handle both workloads very well.
Mars008
How about miniPC + USB x bay enclosure? I'm thinking about it. Have 4 Synology NAS mostly as long offline storage. No problems with them in this role so far.
nh43215rgb
Truenas scale?
jraph
Why do they need to use an old Brtfs fork? What is missing in the mainline kernel for them?
ethersteeds
As I understand it, they forked years ago when btrfs was very much not ready to be used for production NAS storage. Their value prop was they took it and added lots of their own special patches that they claimed made it highly dependable.
Over time their advantage has eroded as upstream has caught up, to the point that it looks ridiculously out of date today.
arp242
And given they're using very old versions of everything, it just sounds like dysfunction and/or moribund development.
kalleboo
I don't know if this is the reason, but supposedly their btrfs fork contains a custom integration with mdraid/lvm so that when btrfs detects a bad block, it signals lvm to do a repair. This is their solution to avoid using btrfs raid5/6 which is still marked unstable.
codeflo
The year is 2025. Delivering a good product is not considered profitable enough anymore. If a company or product is beloved by customers then that means it doesn't squeeze them to the max. This is clearly money left on the table that someone will sooner or later extract. High-end brands are not exempt from this.
atlasduo
Easily explained: when times are tough, delivering growth naturally is hard. Squeezing the customer is the lowest hanging fruit.
Sure, long term reputation is severely damaged, but why would decision makers care? Product owners interests are not aligned with interests of the company itself. Squeeze the customer, get your miniscule growth, call it "unlocking value", get your bonus, slap it onto your resume and move on to the next company. Repeat until retirement.
barnabee
When times are tough, accept less growth (or sometimes none) so that when times get good again or someone builds a competitor, all your customers don't leave you.
immibis
The real big brain move is to be your own competitor, so you extract value from customers either way. If they don't switch, you get to extract value via planned obsolescence and plain old extortion. If they do switch to avoid the extortion, you at least get to keep the price of their new NAS, and you weren't likely to get the extortion money anyway.
America has thousands of food brands but they're all owned by about 6 companies.
folkrav
I guess times have been tough for a long damn while then…
mihaaly
This is more about EBITDA.
Serving the needs of customers (practically the quality of the product) sits down in the list of importance. Sales strategy, marketing, PR, organizational culture, company values, ..., basically the self-serving measures come all before that.
_def
This is depressing, but feels accurate. How do we collectively get out of this mess?
ranger_danger
I think there's actually no point in being profitable, it always seems to lead to even more greed, power and corruption.
Better to have a heart, care more about your customers, don't put profits first, but still make enough to keep the lights on.
I think that would make everyone happier anyways.
lotsoweiners
Don’t give them money.
blitzar
My 10 year old NAS is a testament to how much money they have left on the table; they could 3x revenue and profits by simply breaking it every few years.
xattt
I extended the lifecycle of my 2013 vintage x64 QNAP (which lost support status around 2018 or 2019) by installing Ubuntu directly. The QNAP “firmware” was just an internal USB flash drive (DOM) that lived on a header that contained QNAP’s custom distro. There was a fully-featured standard UEFI that allows booting from the SATA devices.
I learned a lot in the process, but most important is that the special sauce NAS makers purport is usually years behind current versions.
The NAS finally bit the dust last year because of a design defect associated with Bay Trail systems that’s not limited to QNAP.
snowwrestler
Is NAS a growth market at all anymore? My somewhat unexamined opinion is that most folks can and probably do just store everything in the cloud.
I would not be surprised to find out that Synology is seeing a smaller market year over year and becoming desperate to find new revenue per person who is shopping for a NAS today.
etbebl
Isn't the conventional wisdom "at least 2 backups, one offsite"? My lab gets by with 2 copies for most of our data: one on our Synology NAS and one mirrored to Box.
With the size of data we're dealing with, loading everything from cloud all the time would slow analyses down to a crawl. The Synology is networked with 10G Ethernet to most of our workstations.
Uvix
It’s not necessary a growth market, but you do get repeat customers (either as hardware ages or when we want to expand our storage).
I’m in the latter group but Synology has locked themselves out of the market with this choice.
Uploading terabytes of content to the consumer cloud just isn’t practical, financially.
mihaaly
Our organization joined this trend some years ago. The original founders (did ca. 30-35 years ago) passed 60 and cashing out. Sold the company to an investor. Small fish, <100 employee, but in a niche of engineering app development with long time clients, very long time clients. Since then, we are a self declared sales oriented organization, company meetings are about success stories of billing more for the same service, monthly cash-flow analysis (target vs. actual), new marketing materials disseminated broadly, sales campaign, organizational culture, teamwork, HR. Every other has a technical development footnote, all AI (fits right in like designer bags at a pig farm). No QA, none.
benoau
Sounds like they're only missing an epiphany about offshoring the engineering!
mihaaly
Since engineering is a "cost center", that must be decreased, it is a potential scenario, yes.
The other is to fuck engineering. Sell what we currently have, until we can, as expensive as we can, and do not spend on engineering. That is only taking away the money! Can put on some AI glitter to dazzle, but that's it. No one knows what AI is in this narrow field anyway, we can position ourself as revolutionary inventors for anything weird or new. Some will eat up this s*t for sure. Short term is paramount!
layer8
From Wikipedia, the Synology founders are still involved in the company’s leadership.
numpad0
> Delivering a good product is not considered profitable enough
Leaving products and commerce coupled is not considered good practice anymore. It's recommended in some places that you outsource so extremely to the point that your outsourced labor render services to receiving outsourced labor. And that's not considered insane.
deadbabe
It’s not a lot of money left on the table though, the lion’s share of it has already been taken.
bartread
Yes, but that doesn’t stop companies from putting a disproportionate amount of effort into squeezing it out, instead of directing that effort towards developing better products.
quantummagic
Everyone is grabbing what they can in hopes of riding out the coming collapse. Providing a good product is little benefit in the face of looming economic disaster, ie. "the great reset". The fall of the west will be a bumpy ride, good product or not.
fx1994
[flagged]
plqbfbv
I have used Synology NASes for a good 15y now, and the one I'm on will likely be my last (DS920).
I have watched the software evolve from "quite good" to "very good" to "lets reimplement everything ourselves and close it off as much as possible".
It's sad because back in the day, at least for me, the brand was the perfect UX in many regards: small form factor and low power, price-accessible 4/5 bay NASes, a couple CPU tiers, upgradable hardware, regular software updates and a huge collection of software features.
For me they were the go-to choice for NAS because of the good web UI, the ease of setup and reliable operation that covered 99% of the prosumer usecases. They would just chug along forever, auto-updating themselves, never skipping a beat. Whenever I wanted to do special things with it via SSH I could, but the environment has become increasingly hostile to the point where I need to spend hours wondering how the heck the thing operates without bursting on fire.
I'm hoping that by the time I need to change my DS920 another good company like they were will have emerged, because building your own solution comes with operational maintenance and I want the thing to Just Work®.
edem
What are the current options? I've been looking but I haven't found any. I have a DS923+ and it works fine, but I can already see what you are talking about.
CharlesW
I've purchased 3 QNAP NAS products over the course of a decade or so, and remain happy to recommend them. Their reputation was damaged by a raft of ransomware attacks in 2021 and 2022, but since then they've been better about improving overall system security and forcing basic security hygiene on users (who often don't know any better).
itsrobreally
I just got a Ugreen 2800 to replace a homemade NAS, I had a Synology for a few years but it got slower and slower as the software changed so I ditched it maybe 10 years ago?
One of the things that sold me on the Ugreen was that it is basically just a garden-variety N100 box, upgradeable RAM, supports SATA and M.2, etc.
According to this installing your own OS doesn't invalidate the warranty so if I decide their software is lousy I can install Debian https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Ugreen
hedora
I built two intel atom nas machines before switching to synology.
One has no linux or windows video drivers (Intel’s fault — no transcoding), and caught fire (not intel’s fault).
The other was one of the ones where the clock signal is basically a doomsday countdown timer. I had to swap it out for a warranty board for some other reason.
So, there’s no way I’d consider an N100. Other options?
CamperBob2
There are a few previous-generation units still available on the market. This article reminded me that I'd meant to track down a DS1522+ before it's too late, and I found a couple on Amazon and other sites.
tenuousemphasis
TrueNAS Community Edition?
exmadscientist
A big part of the appeal of Synology was that you could just forget about it. I have a little one in the corner that's just been sitting there serving files out over SMB for years now. It doesn't need to do anything more and I don't need to think about it.
A lot of the alternatives being proposed are not so easy to maintain. A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself. And I don't have (and don't want) a 19-inch rack at home. Ever.
So what's the set-up-and-forget-until-it-gets-kicked-over option?
joshstrange
This.
I came to Synology after years of managing regular Linux (Debian) servers, then Unraid, and then Synology.
Synology was the most expensive thing I’ve used but I also _never_ think about it. The same could not be said for previous setups.
I want a stupid-easy NAS, plug-and-play, hotswapable bays. I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives.
I have 2x12-bay Synology’s and I haven’t found an equivalent product yet (open to options).
nine_k
> I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives.
How often do you actually do this? In 15 years of running my own NAS boxes, I so far had to do it once. I, of course, choose slow, middle of the range disks.
joshstrange
I never went more than 1, maybe 2, years without needing to open it up. To be fair, I was adding drives over time as I could afford them and I had a large range of drives of various ages that slowly died out or needed to be replaced with larger capacity drives.
It’s partly the annoyance of being in a cramped space filled with drives but also the downtime. Family and friends use self-hosted software than runs on my main server and uses the NAS(es). Shutting down a NAS means shutting down the software. Yes, I can let them know ahead of time and “schedule downtime” but I dislike needing to do that unless I have to. It just makes the system feel less stable for them and I want to provide a great experience.
With hotswap bays externally accessible I don’t have to stop anything. I’d actually be fine with UnRaid (I still run it as my “app” server) if there was a case with 12 or more 3.5” hotswap bays.
I looked into large JBOD servers but between fan noise and rack mounted servers often being in a whole other class (one I have much less experience in compared to desktop tower builds) I’ve never been able to convince myself to get one.
My Synology 12-bays are quiet and easy to work with so even at ~$1.5K they were a steal in terms of maintenance and upkeep (for me).
Marsymars
I have a similar lack of interest in opening up a tower to swap drives. QNAP has some nice JBOD enclosures. If you don't want any 2.5" drives their biggest enclosures are 8-bays, so you'd need an ATX tower with three available PCIe slots to run all the SFF cables for 3x8 drives. You would need to manage your own software stack with Unraid or w/e.
aidenn0
They make hotswap bays that fit in 5.25" drive bays, and you can find NOS towers that have the necessary number of drive bays.
There are also 3d-printale cases where you buy a SATA backplane and screw it in.
It doesn't solve your software problem (though maybe TrueNAS might work?).
MangoCoffee
agree. i have two synology NAS. i just set them up and forget it since i don't open for outside access.
its a great backup for all your important files.
plqbfbv
So much this. I left another comment that touched on this.
I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months.
I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it.
Synology still scores very high on this single metric.
exmadscientist
Most of the other commenters do not seem to understand the difference between "low maintenance", "low maintenance by someone very skilled in the art", and "no maintenance".
Things that maintain themselves are amazing and I want more of them in my life. Anything that requires shell commands is out out out. That is for younger people.
bonzini
I do that for one thing: Home Assistant, because it's something that I want to customize to provide the best experience for the whole household.
Everything else, I agree and Synology has delivered enough (such a lifetime of 10+ years with full updates) that I am not really happy to try my chances with something else unless the hardware dies.
Dylan16807
You're being pretty vague so it's hard to respond to. But if someone suggests some version of Linux and then leaving it alone, that's no maintenance.
TheCraiggers
I'm not sure I understand. Even a custom Arch install with samba, zfs, NFS, etc would be a "single setup, works forever" deal. It's not like what you configure is going to magically break if you don't look at it.
And security could be an issue, but it's not like Synology is any better there with their old as dirt dependencies.
Snark aside, TrueNas is probably your best bet. Maybe Unraid? Still, with all of these, it's not like they require constant attention to operate.
plqbfbv
A custom Arch install is what I have on my router.
There's no real auto-update for Arch, and it wasn't designed for it (IIRC according to their forums/wiki), so I have to login every now and then and run pacman (I'll admit I haven't invested more than a couple hours searching).
The `kea` package (DHCP server) got updates this summer, 3 weeks apart, that both broke configuration file parsing, and I had to discover the next day on reboot. "But you should have read the changelog!", "But you should have tested the config files on updates!", "But you should have restarted the service!" ...: no, no I don't normally test every config file or restart every service after an upgrade, and I don't normally read Changelogs of all software installed on my machines. I shouldn't have to do that in 2025.
`zfs` is out of kernel, I've dabbled with that for a while until I understood if you want your machine to reboot 100% of the times, you'd better stick with in-kernel filesystems, no matter how worse featureset they have.
Sometimes stuff will just break on package upgrades without notice or warning, and you're left to pick up the pieces, normally in a hurry because your partner is screaming at you.
Compare that with Synology, where I have never, ever needed to login to click "run updates" or put it in "maintenance mode" to fix it. It updates itself, it boots at the set time, it brings up all services, runs periodic scrubbing, informs me via mail, shuts down at the specified time. It has a 2x-SSD mirror for cache, and I don't need to care about the disk layout and configuration, and the cache configuration, .....
It's literally a set-and-forget auto-upgrading box that I can just use instead of maintain.
I understand that Synology is not in good shape anymore, see my other top-comment :)
jmuguy
A lot of commenters don't seem to understand how much of a pain in the ass rolling your own NAS is. And then dealing with drive failures and expanding the storage pool, which is dead simple with Synology, but is completely hair raising (if not impossible) with other solutions.
izacus
There's really nothing that comes close to the hardware + software package Synology offers .
I was looking for alternatives, but anything else didn't come close to Syno Photos+Drive+Surveillance+Active Backup package you get with the NAS.
There's alternatives to each, sure, but they mostly need massively more powerful hardware to run pile of docker containers and end up being alpha quality.
doublerabbit
UnRaid. I'm currently evaluating it on my old 2014 motherboard.
The WebUI is responsive, it can be a bit brickish around the edges requiring you dive in to the logs if something doesn't work; turned out to be bad ram on my host refusing KVM to boot. Once it's up and working it sails.
GPU-PassThru in a Windows VM is proving incredibly smooth especially with using Moonshine on FreeBSD.
The docker ecosystem is a nice addition and the community seems fair. I can too throw all my old SSD drives without limitation (granted the basic licenses only allows six) is nifty in saving dust.
It being based off Slackware is pleasing. It is closed source but so is Synology and for $100 for a fully unlocked feature-rich NAS/OS - totally.
turtlebits
I switched to QNAP and it's been fine.
Krasnol
I wished I'd have spend some time looking them up before I bought 2 new drives for my old Synology. The new QNAP is so much better. I'd have switched just for the UI already..
noAnswer
I find QNAP more annoying to configure. Even their enterprise server rack stuff has Multimedia shares on by default.
hiq
> A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself.
A Debian stable mostly does except on upgrades, and that's rare and painless enough. Even with a Synology you still need to make sure you have proper monitoring in case the hard drives start failing.
tshaddox
That's right. I bought a DS1019+ in 2019 and it's been running constantly for 6 years (except for a handful of power outages and house moves). The power adapter did fail last year and I had to buy a dodgy (albeit well-reviewed) third-party replacement.
malnourish
Similar story. My dodgy, well received PSU died fast and took a couple drives with it. That wasn't fun. Bought an official replacement
M95D
But self-building a NAS is still a problem, and I'm also talking about this [1] article from the same blog:
There are NO low power NAS boards. I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, no video, no audio, lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports.
Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB random disconnects. And no, port replicators aren't much better.
[1] https://lowendbox.com/blog/are-you-recyling-old-hardware-for...
dvdkon
That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no?
The closest thing available now would probably be a Radxa ROCK 5 ITX+, a motherboard with a Rockchip SoC and two M.2 slots, into which you could put their six-port SATA cards. No idea what that whole setup will draw, though.
EDIT: I have to complain about the article you linked. It's certainly true that one should account for power consumption, not just purchase cost, but some crucial mistakes make the article more harmful on the whole.
The author cites 84 W power consumption for an i5-4690, and 10 W for a J4125 CPU, but those figures are the TDP. For all we know, those CPUs could idle at around the same wattage, and from my experience they likely do.
Having done some measuring myself, I'd say the largest source of power draw in an idle NAS will be the PSU, motherboard, and disks. With any remotely recent Intel CPU, it idles so efficiently as to be negligible in a PC.
ethersteeds
> That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no?
I have a Synology DS920+ 4-bay that averaged 20W total including 2 spinning drives with sleep disabled. I agonized about going with the closed product, and in many ways regret it. But at the time there was nothing I could find that came close, even without the drives. And that's before factoring my time administering the DIY option, or that it would be bigger and less ruggedized.
I went as far as finding the German low power motherboard forum spreadsheet and contemplating trying to source some of the years old SKUs there. You've gotta believe us when we say that before the n100s arrived, it was a wasteland for low power options.
In many ways it still is, although these n100 boards with many SATA are a sea change. Once you set out to define requirements, you pretty quickly get to every ZFS explainer saying that you are a fool to even attempt using less than 32 GB of ECC memory...
FredFS456
There are some new NAS boxes hitting the market (UGreen being one of the brands that are cheaper, but also Minisforum) which have solid hardware but aren't locked down at all. They're just x86 boxes with bog-standard hardware so you can just run whatever OS you want, and they support that use case.
lostlogin
mosselman
Thanks for the links.
What do you guys think about security concerns around minisform and ugreen being Chinese companies?
lan321
Add to that Aoostar. It's quite comparable to the Minisforum n5 Pro, a bit cheaper
- Max 48GB*2 DDR5 ECC
- 8 core PRO 8845HS
- 25W with nothing, doing nothing, realistically 50W
- 25G combined network
- 5 M.2 (3x2 and 2x1 lane) and 6 HDDs
- Oculink
https://aoostar.com/blogs/news/the-aoostar-wtr-max11bay-is-a...
Marsymars
> It adopts the enterprise-level PRO 8845HS processor instead of the ordinary consumer-grade 8845hs, which enables this computer to run stably even when it remains powered on for an extended period without being shut down.
Well that's certainly a claim.
M95D
Like I said, I'm still waiting for 10+ SATA bays...
storus
Why don't you look at Topton's N100 boards with 6x SATA, 2.5Gb LAN, PCIe slot for extra SATA ports and Jonsbo N3 NAS case with it? For $300 you'd have a way better NAS than anything Synology offers.
M95D
I think we have different definitions of what "low power" means.
justincormack
What do you want? The N100 is 6W in theory not sure if you can downclock it or how good the power control is. Problem below that is that is mostly mobile phone type CPUs and they dont have much IO. Drives in a NAS are going to consume a bit of power too so its not really clear how low you can go.
SirMaster
Why do you need a bunch of SATA ports? Just get a cheap SAS2 PCIe card on eBay.
There are definitely low power ARM boards with a PCIe lanes. Typically its NVMe, but you can adapt that to 4x PCIe 3.0 which is a lot of bandwidth for HDDs. Not sure why you need a lot of memory for a NAS though, but they do have boards that have 32GB of memory.
What's wrong with this?
https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32GB/dp/B...
And connect a card like this to the NVMe PCIe which you can connect 8 SATA HDDs to with SATA breakout cables.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/155007176276
If you need more than 8 HDDs you can get a SAS2 expander to connect to the SAS2 card and then you could easily connect 24 HDDs with a 6 port SAS2 expander and breakout cables.
Or if you put this small board and card into a server case that has a SAS2 backplane with expander built in, then you can just connect all the disks that way.
Another option, not ARM, but still low power and neat.
https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-sigma
This has Thunderbolt 4 which you can connect to a PCIe slot like this:
https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2832.html
They have a lot of neat stuff, you can get the tiny LattePanda Mu, and dock it in this:
M95D
That SAS/SATA controller would consume more power than all the rest of the system.
CamperBob2
A few watts more or less is so far down any sane list of concerns when selecting a NAS solution, I can't believe it's dominating the discussion here.
SirMaster
Really?
6.1 Electrical Characteristics
The maximum power requirements for the LSI SAS 9200-8i HBA under normal operation are as follows:
PCIe 12.0 V = 0.74 A
Power
— Nominal = 7.92 W
— Worst Case = 13.20 W
Seems like it uses just a little more than 1 large capacity HDD.
procaryote
There are pci boards that let you hook up 4 sata ports to the pci3 on a raspberry pi 5. The drives will be a large part of the power draw, so if you want low power, going for 2 drives is probably better. That probably gets you into the 20-30 watt range
for 10+ sata ports you might as well get an x86 motherboard as it's going to draw lots of power anyway
Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time
M95D
> Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time
I do. Read my other comments.
procaryote
Yeah, it looks like you have somewhat niche requirements and would need to build your own hardware and software.
To run 10+ sata drives you'll either need to take a lot of care they're not spinning up at the same time, or getting used in parallel, or you'll need to dimension your power supply to cope. A beefy power supply will have a higher idle draw making the focus on getting the whole system idle down to 5w pretty hard
whalesalad
rpi sux for longevity - be prepared to mirror and replace the SD card often
procaryote
I've never had this be an issue. If it were an issue, you could probably put just /boot on the sd card and run the system off one of the real disks
whizzter
It's better now, been annoyed like you but the Rpi5 comes in a 16gb variant and has a PCI-E port that can be extended to 5x SATA or 2x M2. It's not blazing but probably an improvement over my old Celeron J1800 with 8gb of ram.
The Intel N100,etc series of machines seems popular with builders even if the RAM restrictions drives me nuts.
I think the major issue seems to be cases actually, there's tons of small cheap AMD machines from manufacturers like BeeLink that trounce most NUC setups for performance, but like the NUC's as soon as there's disc enclosures the price shoots away.
proxyon
> I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU,
Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient.
> no video, no audio
Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much.
> lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports This eats power, conflicting with the rest of your requests.
> Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB random disconnects. And no, port replicators aren't much better.
No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable.
M95D
> Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient.
They are, but the motherboard is not, or at least not as much as an ARM board.
> Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much.
And it would boot... how? AFAIK, no UEFI system is capable of booting headless and very very few BIOS systems were.
> No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable.
I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power.
Marsymars
> I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power.
The N100 on its own can go quite low - my N305 system idles around 5W. (But laptop, so zero SATA ports.)
nine_k
Second-hand Supermicro boards with 6, 8, even 12 SATA ports, 8-16 GB of ECC RAM, a preinstalled CPU, and often a passive radiator are pretty accessible or eBay or suchlike. Of course they are old, but if they did not break after 5-7 years in a server rack, most likely they're not going to break for 10 more years in a less demanding environment at home.
M95D
Not low power. Electricity over 10 years would cost 10 times more than the board.
mjg59
Synology are bad at technical restrictions. That doesn't help most people, and it's not any sort of defense, but anything they strongly attempt to impose here is going to fail. It took me an evening to break the protection they imposed on another layer, and a chunk of that evening was me and a bottle of mezcal and just writing INSERT statements into sqlite, we are really not talking about extreme competence.
But! That doesn't matter, most users are never going to be able to do that themselves, and DMCA protections potentially prevent anyone sharing knowledge of how to do so without putting themselves at risk. The truth is that vendors can, under US law, threaten anyone who tells someone how to make the device they bought work properly with federal offences. Buy something else instead.
charles_f
I don't really get the point of hacking a synology to break this kind of protection. I understand why you'd take one so that you get everything setup for you, but if you're gonna invest time jailbreaking and hacking it, wouldn't you be better off using an old PC with your own linux/software setup as a server?
mjg59
Actually easier to remove the license restrictions around their RTSP backup software than it is to set up an equivalent thing myself
(Edit: I have a very particular set of skills. Having put some time into making this work with tools I could put together myself and failing, I found that my Synology had a tool that did it perfectly and refused to do so for the number of cameras I had. I fixed that.)
shj2105
Are there instructions or a GitHub on how I can remove their restrictions on the number of cameras allowed for DSCam?
CPLX
Is it clear what the actual restrictions are here? I have a couple of diskstations and like them and was about to buy another. How does this actually affect me as a practical matter?
Uvix
It depends on the model you buy. On 2025 models forward, you cannot add unsupported disks to a storage pool. If you bring an existing pool forward from another machine, it will let you continue to use the old disks, but any replacement ones would need to be Synology-branded.
Shank
I recently moved all of my NAS needs to a UNAS Pro and just have an old Intel Bean Canyon NUC in the closet running apps on top of it. Portainer is a reasonable docker frontend, though not perfect -- but more importantly, the storage is just separated from the NAS entirely. As long as your NAS can serve files to a secondary server, you the sky is the limit with what you have actually accessing the files and doing things with.
The particularly jarring thing in this article is the SMB concurrency limits. Those effectively gate your scalability in terms of storage. Even more than forcing their own drives to be used, the concurrent user limit is a clear enterprise upsell: charge people to get a higher limit. The byproduct, of course, is that elaborate home lab connections or setups will also be hit by this.
master_crab
How’s the UNAS? I’m firmly in the UI ecosystem for networking and security and looked at it earlier this year (I think they released the offering only in the past 12-24 months). But my synology 1221 is fairly new so I have at least 5 (probably more) years left of useful life in it.
UI isn’t without their own faults but allowing their unifios to run on grey boxes has improved my opinion of them further.
christkv
That’s what I’m running and it’s been great so far have 7x16gb in raid 5 since reading is the main use case
Paul_S
I ran my own NAS for over two decades in some old 4U I got for cheap, using whatever discarded consumer HW I got for free and I never got the point of Synology. Colleague who has one said it's compact. Well, this year I bought one of those gaming cube cases (with space for 10 drives, what do people do with them in gaming pcs? OK, only 8 spaces are actually drawers with grommets but physically you can fit 10) and retired my 4U.
Seriously, takes an hour to setup your own NAS and you can mix any drives, setup any encryption you want, seedbox etc. I totally understand convenience but this is not a email server you're setting up here, it's just a NAS.
sumtechguy
I did something similar years ago. Couple of drives in an old beige tower case. Setup the sharing wand what not. Not exactly 'hard' but it was one thing. Time consuming. Once you have done it a few times the novelty wears off and its more of a chore to mess around with the thing. NAS boxes like that 'just work'. You plug some drives in, set it up, done. However, one comment in here puts it perfectly. The software on syno is wildly out of date. It has been for 15 years. Ease of use is now outweighed by something recent software wise. The syno guys are literally leaving nearm 20-30% perf uplift out. For 'reasons'. Those reasons are wearing very thin. It will mean I need a different backup solution for my computers. One that handles full disk incremental and stored windows and linux on the remote drive and not something I 'run once and awhile' and perferably open source.
Paul_S
20 years ago it was a chore but nowadays it's faster than baking a cake. 10 minutes prep time (configure os and add drives), 10 minutes bake time (installation) (or 10+ hours bake time if count building the array)
But let's assume you don't have a clue and have to follow some tutorial and do some reading and it takes you 2 hours. That's amortised across a decade. Especially now when easy distro upgrades are basically unattended so you can use the same setup for a decade and stay up to date.
martijn_himself
I'm interested in starting out like this, I have a bunch of 2.5" SSD's I'm not using- do you have any tips on what cube to get? Are you concerned about power usage at all especially if this is always on?
Paul_S
Any of those cube gaming ones I think are great. I got a dual chamber one which makes shuffling drives and cabling easy. Can't remember the name but it was 90 pounds, way more than I paid for the old 4U, although inflation from the 90s probably means it was more expensive in real terms. Most of the power is used to spin rust so not sure it's worth worrying about the HW power use, just use whatever old pc you can get for free, ask colleagues and family, people throw out working PCs all the time, it's a NAS, not a rendering farm, if it boots it's good enough IMHO.
Paul_S
Found the name: Fractal node 804.
mrb
For the last 20+ years I have always built my own home NAS. 6 to 8 drives. ZFS. Initially OpenSolaris, then FreeBSD, and nowadays Debian. I would hate to use a proprietary solution like Synology. I'm generally very happy with my builds, hardware-wise and software-wise. Surprisingly the most annoying thing of a custom build is that there aren't many choices of decent compact 8-drive NAS chassis (it's a small market after all). By compact, I mean micro-ATX or smaller. Because there is no standard placement of SATA ports on a motherboard, sometimes depending on the combination of motherboard and chassis, it's physically impossible to plug in all cables in the ports. Even when using a combination of straight and right-angle cables. Currently I'm using https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/MATX-ITX-mainboard-8-... (many Chinese companies sell similar clones) It's not as compact as an 8-drive Synology NAS chassis but it's compact enough for me.
flakeoil
Yes, a standard Linux computer is the way to go. I would argue most people do not need complicated redundant drive setups. A regular computer with a standard SSD works fine. Probably good to start out with a new one though and not reuse an old one from an old computer.
buibuibui
I actually like their software offerings like Synology Drive and Synology Moments. Their backup solution also seem to "just work" with Hyper Backup. I'm using a Mac und tried to use Nextcloud, but my conclusion with the Nextcloud Desktop Client is, that it is buggy as hell. Especially the VFS implementation. Synology Drive in opposite just works (for me).
conradfr
I have a basic Synology DS<something> and like it (for the price). I also use their Android app to stream music and it's not stellar but works I guess.
I'm more shocked by the state of samba in macOS (without additional software). Having to go to the network and manually reconnect to the NAS share every time I come back home is ... poor.
lostlogin
It’s so poor.
To get my mini power up, connect SMB then start some containers I made a horrific Automator app, which runs a script and just tries, sleeps then tries again until my containers can boot and access their data. It’s disgusting. But it works.
esel2k
I kept beeing a fan of Synology mainly for their apps and ease of use.
I have bought a used DS920+ with 20GB or Ram - still a perfect combo of transcoding and docker. However since I started discovering the world of selfhosted apps, Synology has no unique selling point anymore. Their apps stalled in innovation and with this drama I would go for some dedicated linux hardware with docker and thats it. Most of the data fits on a simple 2Drive NAS today anyway.
Hamuko
Pretty much everything on my Synology DS920+ is running inside Docker. I think the only exception is Plex, which I've installed natively on the device – but even Plex needs to be downloaded directly from Plex because the one in the package center is outdated.
When I outgrow my DS920+, I'm probably gonna build a custom Unraid machine to replace it. Most of my needs from Synology are being able to run Docker containers and mix-and-match drives.
lostlogin
I graduated from Synology docker, to Docker compose and my world got better.
The weird quirks of Synology Docker are painful. Eg containers that won’t stop, or won’t start. It’s not easy to get into the containers (docker exec), recreating is tricky compared to copying and pasting docker-compose.yml.
Hamuko
Synology Docker aka Container Manager has support for Docker Compose under "Projects". It even explicitly gives you the option or either uploading a ready-made docker-compose.yml or to create a new one.
Personally, I mainly use the CLI to manage my Compose files even on Synology DSM.
fragmede
I tried unRAID but ran into a bunch of bugs/issues/missing features and it's not open source so it's a dead end. It's a cool concept but I'd look elsewhere.
nikanj
It's the circle of life:
1) Established players are all overpriced and focus on value extraction, not customer service
2) By actually helping your customers and providing good solutions at an affordable price, you can quickly grow to be a big player in the space
3) Now that we are a big player, we could be making big bugs by squeezing the customers who can't easily switch away
4) Established players are all overpriced and focus on value extraction, not customer service
Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff.
On products you can buy TODAY, you find:
They claim it's OK because they've backported all security fixes to their versions. I don't believe them. The (theoretical) huge effort needed for doing that would allow them to grow a way better product.And it's not only about security, but about features (well, some are security features too). We're missing new kernel features (network hardware offload, security, wireguard...), filesystem (btrfs features, performance and error patches...), file servers (new features and compatibility, as Parallel NFS or Multichannel CIFS/SMB), and so on...
I think they got stuck on 4.4 because of their btrfs fork, and now they're too deep on their own hole.
Also, their backend is a mess. A bunch of different apps developed on different ways that mostly don't talk to each other. They sometimes overlap with each other and have very essential features that don't work and don't plan to fix. Meanwhile, they're busy releasing AI stuff features for the "Office" app.
Edit note: For myself and some business stuff, I have a bunch of TrueNAS deployments, from a small Jonsbo box for my home, to a +16 disk rack server. This was for a client that wanted to migrate from another Synology they had on loan, and I didn't want to push a server on them, as they're a bit far away from me, and I wanted it to be serviceable by anyone. I regret it.